I steeled myself to crouch and look closer at his face.
It had been a handsome face and probably very young, although at least a year’s worth of Everest-altitude winds and sunlight had weathered it in odd ways. I could still see deep marks where a standard oxygen mask had been pressed down on the last day of his life near the bridge of his finely shaped nose and on both sides of what must have been a well-shaped mouth. It was disturbing to look at his mouth, actually, since either a final death scream or the tightening tendons associated with death had pulled it bizarrely open, shriveled lips pulled back and away from the white teeth, exposing a brown gum line.
His eyelids were closed—and the eyes themselves seemed deeply sunken, as if the eyeballs were missing—and frost and snow had settled in the occipital orbits. The right side of that once handsome young face appeared almost untouched except for odd, translucent strips of skin hanging from his cheeks, forehead, and chin. What I first took to be a wound from a fall, a split of flesh and skin on the left side of his face, was, I realized just before the others arrived, only an open gouge where goraks had been pecking at the frozen flesh to get at softer tissue below. This had exposed the poor man’s left cheekbone, all of his teeth on the left side of his face, and ridges of brownish ligaments and muscle tissue. It was as if that side of the corpse’s face was smiling broadly at me, and I confess that the effect disturbed me.
Half of his forehead and scalp had come free from the dislodged motorcycle helmet and wool cap, and the hair I saw there was short and so blond as to look white through my Crooke’s glass goggles. I tugged the goggles up for a moment to look more closely and realized that the short, still-combed-back hair was white—but almost certainly because it had been bleached so by a year of exposure to the ferocious ultraviolet rays at this altitude. There was white stubble on the intact right side of his face, but some of the stubble was still blond along the shaded jawline of the damaged side.
I looked around for a rucksack or other detritus from a fall, but the only pack the corpse carried was a small canvas gas mask carryall slung around his neck in front, just as George Mallory’s had been. Fighting down a sudden surge of nausea, I reattached my face mask to my leather motorcycle helmet, set the regulator valve to low flow, and gulped down some English air to get my brain cells working again.
I stepped back from the body just as my four climbing companions kicked their way up the last yards of the gully to stand beside me. There was a shared moment of silence, more to let our lungs fight for oxygen than out of any intentional respect for the dead man at our feet. That would come later…For now, I drank in the rich air set to the 15,000-foot level from my pressurized tank and blinked away black dots that had been briefly dancing in my narrowing cone of vision. That free climb over the ridge rocks, at above 28,000 feet, wasn’t the smartest thing I’d done this endless week.
I tugged my mask down. “Is this your cousin Percival, Reggie?”
Reggie shot me a glance almost as if she was unsure I was being serious. Then she saw I was and shook her head. Her tumble on the slope had allowed a few strands of her beautiful blue-black hair to escape her fur-lined leather flying helmet. She had also just pushed up her heavy goggles, the better to inspect the corpse, I assumed, and her eyes were a more lovely ultramarine color than ever.
“This man looks to have been in his early twenties when he died,” said Reggie. “My cousin Percy turned thirty-four last year. Also, Percy has—had—dark hair, longer than this, and a sort of thin black mustache the way Douglas Fairbanks wore it in The Mark of Zorro.”
“Who is this, then?”
“Gentlemen,” continued Reggie, her voice sad, “you are looking at the mortal remains of twenty-two-year-old Andrew Comyn ‘Sandy’ Irvine.”
Jean-Claude crossed himself. It was the first time I’d seen him do that.
I tugged my mask down long enough to say, “I don’t understand. I found Mallory seven or eight hundred feet lower…but there’s a rope around Irvine here, too. Also snapped off fairly close to the body…” I stopped.
The Deacon looked around. “You’re right, Jake,” he said. There was still only the lightest of breezes here above 28,000 feet. “Mallory didn’t fall from this height—down through the Yellow Band and across those poorly defined ridges and all those rocks—or his body would have been much more torn up.”
“They were down-climbing separately, then?” asked Jean-Claude. The disapproval in his tone of voice was that of a veteran Chamonix Guide.
“I don’t think so,” said the Deacon. “I think the accident—the fall—happened quite a ways below here, below the Yellow Band and that ridgeline, somewhere in those rock gullies below. One of them fell first—and, hard as it is to believe, I think it was Mallory.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because of the injury to Irvine’s knee,” said Pasang, panting.
I hadn’t noticed it. The fabric there just above the once light-colored but now filthy puttees was torn and caked with dried blood, the knee an exposed mass of gristle and smashed cartilage.
“What does that prove?” I asked before setting my mask back in place.
“It proves that Irvine had a small fall, Mallory a longer one,” said the Deacon. “But notice that the three-eighths-inch climbing rope has been broken off only ten or so feet from Irvine’s body—same as from Mallory’s—so my guess is that it snapped over a sharp rock edge, but not before giving both men internal injuries.”
“Which they died of?” asked Reggie.
“No,” said Pasang. “Mr. Mallory died from the results of his fall and the freezing night temperatures. But I think, as we all saw, that he must have lost consciousness from the terrible head wound, if not from the agony of the broken leg, within minutes, if not seconds. Mr. Irvine here was, I believe, pulled off his perch, probably a belay stance on a boulder somewhere below here, broke his knee in the short fall—very, very painful, by the way, a broken knee is one of the most painful injuries the body can sustain. But, with the rope broken, and probably hearing the diminishing screams and rock sounds of Mr. Mallory’s long fall, Mr. Irvine crawled some yards or even hundreds of feet uphill to this point before he sat in the darkness and froze to death.”
“Why would he go up the hill?” asked Jean-Claude. “Their Camp Six was several hundred yards downhill and to the east.”
“You remember that neither Mr. Mallory nor Mr. Irvine had a compass,” Pasang said softly. “Mr. Mallory was leading the way down through the rock mazes below the Yellow Band when he fell—perhaps—but definitely pulling Mr. Irvine off his belay stance before the rope broke, causing Mr. Irvine’s broken patella.”
“Patella?” said J.C.
“Kneecap,” said Pasang.
“But still,” persisted Jean-Claude, “why would Irvine drag himself up the hill when Mallory had fallen down it?”
“Perhaps because there was a remaining band of sunset light up here near the ridge and Sandy was very, very cold and thought it might give him a few more minutes of warmth and life,” Reggie suggested. “Anyway, here is his notebook.”
She’d taken it not from the gas mask carryall but from Irvine’s Norfolk jacket breast pocket. We all crowded around. As we’d seen before, Sandy Irvine’s spelling was atrocious—probably a case of dyslexia, I realized many, many years later—but here he’d used a dull pencil to abbreviate most of his words, and reading it was like deciphering a German code.
I tugged my mask down again. “What does this mean—dsdkd 1st btl 3.48 m. in2 asnt aft V jt blw 1st st aft u fl fl 2.2l alwy?”